We’ve been building and shipping faster than ever before – so fast that it’s easy to miss some of the new improvements that could speed up your subtitling workflow, or make Amara the perfect tool for your organization. As Amara’s product manager, I spend a lot of time looking at what we’re about to release and what we’ve just released, to communicate it effectively to our users and stakeholders. The increase in release frequency set me on a search for new communication methods regarding what Amara’s building – communications that could exist in a single spot, rather than a flurry of emails and different Google Drive documents. Keeping a Changelog in plain language stood out as one of the ways Amara could accomplish this.
So, I’m proud to introduce the Amara Changelog page!
The Changelog can answer questions like:
“How is Amara different than it was a month ago?”
“Did the feature I asked for ever get built?”
“What was added to Amara last week?”
Following along with new features should be easy for both current Amara users and anyone interested in starting to use Amara. In the Changelog, you can see why and how we’ve chosen improvements being made to the platform.
Who should read the Changelog?
The Changelog is for humans – it makes it easy for users, potential users, Amara staff, and contributors to see what notable changes we have made between each release of Amara. You can find new features here, if you want to skim through the last month instead of looking at every blog post in the Features section. We’ve always posted release notes, but now we’re stepping back from the language of software development and describing our releases in plain language.
What is it the Changelog for?
From our perspective, having a Changelog serves the following purposes:
- Give users an easy way to track what’s new
- Help us communicate better internally and frame our work in terms of the value it delivers to our users
- Help us record and communicate our own progress internally and with users
- Allows us, and you, to clearly see the narrative of our constantly changing software
Releasing lots of new features only does so much good if people don’t know about them. Let us know what you think of the Changelog in the comments below, we’re always open to improving clarity, transparency, and how we share information with the Amara community!
